"Considering the possibility of a truly proletarian #art, the great English literary critic William Empson once wrote, “the reason an English audience can enjoy Russian propagandist films is that the #propaganda is too remote to be annoying." Perhaps this is why American artists and bohemians have so often taken to the political iconography of far-flung regimes, in ways both romantic and ironic. One nation’s tedious socialist realism is another’s radical exotica."

http://www.openculture.com/2013/04/how_the_cia_turned_american_abstract_expressionism_into_cold_war_propaganda.html